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Thursday, 15 June 2017

Broadband Rant

Blogging has become more sporadic than I would like. We are back in the land of Internet again (oh the joys of living in the country) so I am taking no chances and taking my time with the laptop before the little monsters come home from school and drain the gigabytes again. They are gigabyte vampires, sucking our monthly allowance dry within seconds and not leaving even a drop for the sensible adults in the house. I jest, I will admit to having an enthusiastic You tube habit, so in fairness, it is survival of the fittest in this household when it comes to grabbing Internet usage.

The problem is, we would love to change providers and switch to fibre broadband like so many of our neighbours in town. We live on the edge of a small country village and are by no means isolated by fields and lack of people. I live on a lane with 6 other houses within spitting distance. We never installed a phone line as we both had mobile phones and another bill just wasn't in the budget, but now with Eir bringing fibre broadband in, we were eager to sign up and kill two birds with one stone. Sounds simple doesn't it?

To clarify, my next door neighbour's house is less than 15 feet to my left. We can hear the kids 2 doors down playing in their garden and the main road is in audible distance. All very cosy. Our next door neighbour also has a phone line, always has. As do some of the other neighbours and we have a neat line of telephone poles planted along the lane way.

You may wonder why I'm giving you all this detail. You see, an Eir salesperson called to our door late one Summer's eve last July. They explained fibre broadband was the way to go and that they would organise the installation of a phoneline. Happy days, we signed on the dotted line, gave bank details for a direct debit and waited. And waited. We contacted Eir who advised that the contract had been cancelled (without advising us!) and we asked for it to be set up again. Cue another late night visit from an Eir Salesperson, who promised all would be sorted and we would be up and running in no time. Again we waited. And waited.

After copious calls we were granted a date when a man working for KN Group would come out and install everything for us. There was a lot of confusion over this. A meeting would be arranged and confirmed and then a poor confused workman would arrive at our house scratching his head, saying that he couldn't do his part of the job as Eir hadn't completed work and there were no spares to hook us up. He ended up having to leave, as he could go no further. This happened a few times. We got wise to the terminology and would ask the lady on the phone booking the appointment, did she know if Eir had completed their side of the work yet. She would go by the notes in front of her and confirm yes, they had. Yet the poor workmen coming out would always leave scratching their heads, saying that they were unable to do their job until Eir had completed their side first.

In the meantime, surveys were done and a new telephone pole was erected on our property (yes, on our property) and we tried to get speaking to someone in Eir who knew what was going on. We ended up contacting Comreg to make an official complaint because nobody was willing to talk to us. We only want a phoneline installed!

It forced Eir to contact us and they advised that they were unable to provide us with a phoneline as our dwelling is 'not supported by their infrastructure'! I am baffled! How is it not supported? Do I live in outer Mongolia? Possibly deep in the Amazonian rain forest? They got a man on the moon to make a call, why can't I? Especially as every other house on the lane is able to avail of this service! It's a disgrace in this day and age. The age of communication and the only communications company in the country refuses to give us the device we need to communicate. They also failed to communicate this to us until they were forced to by Comreg. What a joke!

2 comments:

Toss that infrastructure in the Aga and redesign a new one that will support the customers?

Good grief. Maybe they've got 1024 customers, and you're #1025 and there just isn't the plug to stick your line into. Maybe it's a sign to kick the YouTube habit? Or may you're supposed to spend the money you save, not having a landline, on yarn.

Wow. We did a similar "upgrade" here on our side of the pond recently. We even changed the landline number we've had my entire life because it would be "so much cheaper" to do one complete bundle. They ended up coming out three or four times before they could actually do anything. The first time we discovered the company had our address in the system wrong. The worker had actually first gone to our neighbor (the address that was in the system) who of course knew nothing about it. So he said that he would have it corrected and set up a new appointment. Then we went through all of that again with the second appointment, except I actually talked to the person on the phone myself and gave them the correct address. Even the worker who was here at our house said that it was incompetence. Last I heard we were still having problems. Our service was actually disconnected at one point because we had supposedly not paid our bill (which was automatically set up). Somehow they had not canceled our original account. And that whole thing was actually repeated. What's with these "communication" companies not being able to communicate??Maybe it's just a sign that all us knitters need to just go live on a huge island somewhere together with no technology, because with all of us on the same island, we won't really need it!